The ivory king

Though to-day we look to Asia and Africa for elephants, and consider the huge proboscidians as extremely un-American, they originally roamed this country in vast herds, and were as common on our plains and prairies as are many animals of the present day. The mastodon, in the estimation of many naturalists, existed up to five hundred years ago; and, judging from the apparent freshness of the remains, there is no great objection to the belief. They were undoubtedly hunted by the ancestors of the mound-builders and early tribes; and, while other agencies may have aided in their extermination, the aboriginal hunter was an all-powerful factor, the result being no more remarkable than that going on at present in the extermination of the bison. What sights the early American boys and girls must have witnessed, assuming this to have been the case! The mighty mastodons, with their huge bodies and pillar-like legs, presented a far more impressive spectacle than the largest elephant of to-day; and when a captive giant was brought in, or found mired in a bog, what shouts and cries arose from these children, perhaps, of the mound-builders!

The tusks of the mastodon were marvels of beauty. Those of some species were straight, turning only at the tips: others had three tusks, two in the upper jaw, and one in the lower, the latter ordinarily of small size, though occasionally they attained large dimensions. Some individuals had four of these ivory weapons, giving them a strange and ferocious appearance.

The discovery that mastodons existed in America at one time, was made over a hundred years ago. In 1714 Dr. Cotton Mather of Boston forwarded a paper to the Royal Society of London, describing some mastodon bones, and endeavoring to prove that they were those of some giant mentioned in Holy Writ. The mastodon he referred to was discovered near Albany in 1705; and some of the grinders, or teeth, weighed four pounds. Thirty-five years later, a French officer, named Longueil, while travelling through what is now the State of Ohio, found near the Ohio River in a swamp a number of bones and tusks. Some of these were carried to Paris. In 1763 Mr. George Croghan, an Englishman, made a valuable find of mastodon remains near the celebrated Big Bone Lick of Kentucky. It was estimated that the finds represented the remains of thirty individuals. Some of the tusks which were found about six feet from the surface were seven feet in length.

The next important discovery was made on the Walkill River, about seventy miles from New York, by the Rev. Robert Annan. The bones were found in digging a ditch; and, from their position, it was evident that the huge animal had died standing, or had been mired, and so met its death. In 1805 Bishop Madison of Virginia communicated to “The Scientific World” the discovery of some mastodon bones that were found about five feet beneath the ground. This find was extremely interesting and valuable; as with the body, or in a position which represented the stomach of one of the skeletons, was found a mass of ground and bruised vegetation, which upon analysis showed that it was made up of grass, shrubs, and leaves, and of a species of rose still growing in Virginia. The Indians, who, it seems, made the discovery, stated that among these there was one that flesh still adhered to, and that it had a long nose.

Quite a number of Indian tribes have traditions concerning animals with a long nose, or trunk. The most familiar is that of the Delaware tribe, and the following is the statement that the natives claim to have been handed down by their ancestors: “That in ancient times a herd of these tremendous animals came to the Big Bone Licks, and began a universal destruction of the bear, deer, elks, buffaloes, and other animals, which had been created for the use of the Indians; that the Great Man above, looking down, and seeing this, was so enraged that he seized his lightning, descended on the earth, seated himself on a neighboring mountain on a rock, on which his seat and the print of his feet are still to be seen, and hurled his bolts among them till the whole were slaughtered, except the big bull, who, presenting his forehead to the shafts, shook them off as they fell; but, missing one at length, it wounded him in the side; whereon, springing round, he bounded over the Ohio, over the Wabash, the Illinois, and finally over the Great Lakes, where he is living at this day.”

Mastodon tusks and remains have been unearthed in various parts of the State of California, showing that the huge elephants roamed over the entire continent just as the African elephant originally did on that continent. In California the remains of the mastodon have been found associated with human bones, stone implements, the remains of the elephant, tapir, bison, and modern horse. Mr. Stickney, the well-known Indian agent, states that “particular persons in every nation were selected as the repositories of their history and traditions; that these persons had others who were younger, selected for this purpose continually, and repeatedly instructed in those things which were handed down from generation to generation; and that there was a tradition among the Indians of the existence of the mastodon; that they were often seen; that they fed on the boughs of a species of lime-tree; and that they did not lie down, but leaned against a tree to sleep.”

Some tribes are familiar with such remains, and call them “fathers of oxen,” and state that they lived long years ago with a race of gigantic men, and that the Great Spirit killed them all with fire-bolts.

According to Dr. Barton, in 1761 there were found by Indians in this country five huge carcasses with long noses above their mouths; but this lacks satisfactory proof. In some of the ancient carvings in Mexico and Yucatan, especially those at Palenque, representations of an elephant’s head are to be seen; and it is assumed that the artists must have been acquainted with the animals, or have had some tradition concerning them. Mr. Latrobe relates that “near the city of Tezcuco, one of the ancient roads or causeways was discovered; and on one side, only three feet below the surface, in what may have been the ditch of the road, there lay the entire skeleton of a mastodon. It bore every appearance of having been coeval with the period when the road was used.” An old Mexican hieroglyphic represents a sacrificing priest with head covered with a casque, in which the head of an animal bearing a striking resemblance to the elephant may be seen. The trunk is too distinct and plain to be an accidental resemblance; and the artist did not have the tapir in view when he produced it, the head being decidedly elephantine.

Professor Holmes found the bones of the mastodon associated with pottery on the banks of the Ashley River, near Charleston, S.C.; and, in the majority of these cases, the mastodon’s remains were discovered very near the surface. Professor Winchell states that he has himself “seen the bones of the mastodon and elephant embedded in peat, at depths so shallow that he could readily believe the animals to have occupied the country during its possession by the Indians.” The so-called elephant-mound, referred to in these pages, is considered by some as evidence that the mastodon was a familiar form to the early American; so with the Indian pipes (Plate XVIII.). If they are intended to represent elephants, which one can hardly doubt, the maker must either have seen the mastodon, or have had it accurately described to him. Quite recently some tracks, presumably those of the mastodon or elephant, have been discovered on the surface of a sandstone quarry at Carson City, in Nevada. They represent a series of circular depressions from three to six inches in depth, each about twenty inches in diameter, which, according to the method of measuring the height of elephants in India, would give an elephant ten feet high. The impressions have been traced for forty feet, and show distinct footprints giving a stride of about five feet eight inches.

The largest find ever made in this country, with the exception perhaps of the vast collection at the Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, was that at Warren, N.J., in 1845, where no less than six almost perfect skeletons were found six feet below the surface. A farmer discovered them while digging out mud from a small swamp; and, as most of the huge creatures were standing upright, it is evident that they became mired in the bog, and slowly sank into it. We can imagine the scene when these six monsters were entrapped,—their trumpeting, their roars of rage and fear, their mighty struggles to escape, that, with their combined weight, only served to mire them deeper and deeper, until they finally disappeared, to remain entombed for untold ages, and to be finally found, and placed in our museums and halls of science as monuments of a lost race.

Nearly all the mastodons are found in swamps, showing that possibly these morasses appeared to be veritable traps that hastened the extinction of these monarchs of the forest. This may be considered the popular theory of one method by which mastodons were destroyed: but there is no better authority than Professor James Hall, the present geologist in chief of the State of New York; and his opinions are entirely different. His views are, that the extinction of the mastodon was hastened by the glacial period, and that most of the remains discovered have been dropped in hollows or ponds, from the ice perhaps, and the peat formed over them. He advances in favor of this the fact that several tusks have been discovered which show evidences of glacial action. There is such a tusk in the collection of the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences, worn by supposed glacial action; and Rutgers College has the extremity of a tusk, showing what is considered by Professor Hall to be glacial striæ.

Referring to the Big Bone Lick, Professor Hall says, “With our present knowledge, it would appear that this accumulation of bones, teeth, and tusks of mastodon, in Kentucky, may have been caused by the melting of a glacier in which they had become embedded, and, being gradually pushed forward to its southern limit, had been deposited in this place. There are other similar localities of less importance and extent, where mastodon remains have been obtained in considerable numbers; and it is not improbable that a critical examination of all known collections may furnish some further evidence of conditions similar to those indicated by the specimens in the Museums of the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences and of Rutgers College.

“However heterodox these views may appear, as opposed to the generally received opinions of the age and relations of the mastodon, I feel quite sure that some other hypothesis than the one usually entertained must be adopted in order to arrive at a satisfactory explanation of the mode and conditions of distribution and inhumation of the mastodon and fossil elephant remains of this country.

“In advocating this opinion regarding the extermination of the mastodon, I have reference to the remains as they have come under my own observation: and I do not mean to be understood as opposing in toto, the views so generally entertained, that the mastodon has existed during the present epoch; or that the opinion held by some of our scientists, that the animal may have existed both before and since the glacial period, is untenable. I refer only to the phenomena usually accompanying these remains, and the conditions attending those which have been exhumed within the State of New York and adjacent parts of New Jersey, and to some extent in other parts of the country. The locality of Big Bone Lick in Kentucky, which has furnished the fragmentary parts of so many skeletons (and some other Western localities), I have not visited; but the evidence already given in relation to the bones from this place, indicates very clearly that they had suffered from glacial action; and the animals were, as we infer, of the glacial period.”

On the great Osage River, the mastodons were sunk in the mud in a vertical position. Perhaps the most interesting find in New-York State was what is known as the Cohoes mastodon. In the fall of 1866 a number of workmen were employed in excavating the foundation for the Harmony Mills Company, in Cohoes; and after much labor, during which several thousand loads of muck or peaty soil, and old trunks of trees, had been removed, one of the men discovered the jaw-bone of some gigantic animal. The bone was found almost at the water-level, and at a depth of twenty-five feet below the surface; the entire locality being clay and earth, which formerly had been filled in to cover a swampy depression.

The report of the find was conveyed to Professor James Hall, who immediately undertook the superintendence of the search. He soon saw that the locality had at one time been the bed of the river, and that the remains were evidently in a vast pot-hole,—a circular pit often seen in the rock-borders of rivers at the present day. The discovery of the jaw pointed to the assumption that the entire skeleton could not be far off, and careful search was immediately commenced. Loads of refuse, old trunks of trees showing the imprint of beavers’ teeth, broken slate, water-worn pebbles, were removed, and finally, in the bottom of the great pot-hole, upon a mass of material similar to that which had been taken out, covered with river-ooze and vegetable soil, the principal parts of the great mastodon were found. First, the bones of the hind-legs appeared, and a portion of the pelvis; and against the sloping wall reclined the massive head with tusks complete, unbroken and undisturbed; then followed many of the other portions of the skeleton, all lodged in a pot-hole of great depth. Sixty feet were explored without finding bottom; and the supposition was, that the animal had in some way been caught in a glacier, and gradually melted out as the great mass of ice slowly moved down over the face of the country, dropping it into this natural tomb. This complete skeleton (Plate V.) was presented to the cabinet of the State Museum at Albany, and is now on exhibition there, one of the finest specimens in existence. Its dimensions are as follows:—

In some of the mastodons found, remains of food have been discovered between the ribs: thus it has been determined that the huge creature existed when the country appeared much as it does to-day. The Mastodon giganteus fed upon the spruce and fir trees. The mastodons wandered over almost every country known, and their remains are very common in South America. Humboldt found them as far north as Santa Fe de Bogota, and they have been discovered as far south as Buenos Ayres. Their range in South America has been given from five degrees north to about thirty-seven degrees south; and they were probably not restricted to this area.

Like the elephants of the present day, they wandered to great elevations, even up to the borders of perpetual snow; and a tooth described by Cuvier was obtained by Humboldt, in a volcano, at an elevation of seventy-two hundred feet above the level of the sea. A fine collection of these South-American mastodons is exhibited in the museum at Santiago. They were found by a party of men in an attempt to drain Lake Tagua in the province of Colchagua, about one hundred miles south of Santiago, sixty from the Pacific, and fourteen hundred feet above the sea. A ditch was cut, to drain off the water; and, after it had been drawn off, the remains of the great animal were seen lying upon the bottom.

With these mastodons, there existed in North America an elephant, E. Columbi, which probably associated in herds with the mastodon, but were not as large. The mastodons were extremely ponderous, and exceeded the largest elephant of to-day in size, and, though resembling them in general appearance, differed in several marked features. The tusks often grew in a peculiar manner: two large, nearly straight ones appeared in the upper jaw, while one or two protruded from the lower. As a rule, these lower incisors were small; but in some instances they attained considerable size. Imagine an elephant eleven or more feet in height, with three or four enormous sharp ivory tusks, its trunk raised aloft, rushing at an enemy! surely, such an animal was the true king of beasts, even in these early days. The tusks of the mastodons assumed many strange shapes, and a herd of these great creatures must have presented a curious appearance. As in other proboscidians, the teeth consisted of incisors and molars. In the Mastodon turiensis of the pliocene time, found at Sismonda, the tusks of the upper jaw were nearly straight, though bending their points toward each other, long, sharp, and powerful. In a mastodon whose remains were found in Ohio (Mastodon Ohioticus), the tusks were long, gradually rising at the ends in a graceful curve; while in the lower jaw appeared a small single tusk. These lower incisors were present in the young of both sexes of this species, but were soon shed by the female, one being retained in the male; so that it was a three-tusked mastodon. In the Mastodon longirostris, there were, besides the two upper tusks, two long, slender tusks in the lower jaw, a defence more formidable than that possessed by any animal of to-day. In the elephant, the enamel is confined to the apex of the tusks; but in the huge mastodons They often had longitudinal bands of enamel, more or less spirally disposed upon their surface. The molar or grinding teeth of the mastodons appeared, much as in the elephants, in a horizontal succession: the front or worn-out teeth were pushed out or lost before the complete development of the posterior ones, which gradually moved forward to take the place of those which were worn out or ground away. The process was not as perfect as that in the present elephant, described in chapter first; as sometimes three teeth were in each jaw of the mastodon at the same time. The teeth are the chief points of distinction between the elephant and the mastodon; and they are readily recognized by the grinding surfaces of the molars, which have transverse ridges, their summits being divided into conical cusps, with smaller ones often clustered about them. The enamel is quite thick: the cementum, which is so plentiful in the teeth of elephants, is very scanty, never filling in the interspaces of the ridges; so that the teeth present a serrated edge.

The great mastodon, many species of which are known, lived during what is known as the miocene time of geology, ranging from the middle of this period to the end of the pliocene, in the Old World, when they appear to have become extinct. In Ohio, the mastodons lived to a much later time, surviving until the late pliocene period, and were, as I have suggested, probably hunted by early man, if he was in existence at that time.

The mastodons had a wide geographical range, being found in almost every country. Nine species are known from Europe,—M. angustidens, M. borsoni, M. pentelici, M. pyrenaicus, M. taperoides, M. virgatidens, M. avernensis, M. dissimilis, and M. longirostris. Five species have been found in India, and four in North America. Two are from South America. Two only have been found in England.

Mastodons undoubtedly lived in Australia; a molar tooth of M. andium, or a similar form, having been found in New South Wales.

From this brief review of the early proboscidians, it will be seen that the elephant, as we popularly term all proboscidians, had originally as wide a range as man, appearing in almost every country; and it is even described by Pliny as being very plentiful in the forests of the so-called Atlantis.

Equally as interesting as the huge mastodon was the pygmy elephant, two species of which formerly existed. These were remarkably diminutive creatures, about the size of ordinary sheep; while their baby elephants must have been about that of ordinary cats. We can imagine a herd of these wonderful little creatures roaming about, and the strange appearance they must have presented. Their names are Elephas melittensis and E. falconeri; their bones are found in Malta and various parts of Italy. Living small or pygmy elephants are frequently referred to in old works. Bles, a correspondent of Buffon, states that he saw one in the Kandyan kingdom not larger than a heifer, and covered with hair. Bishop Heber says, that, in his journey from Bareilly to the Himalayas, he saw the Rájah Gourman Sing mounted on an elephant hardly bigger than a Durham ox, and almost as shaggy as a poodle.

It would seem that at one time a pygmy elephant existed in the Philippines, perhaps when they were connected to the Indian continent; as Professor Semper found the tooth of a fossil species at Mindanao, on the upper course of the Agusan, the most southerly of the group. The tooth, which this eminent scientist considers to have belonged to a dwarf species of the Indian elephant, was used in a remarkable ceremonial. It was worn by the Baganis, or chiefs of a cannibal race, on important occasions, strung about the neck with various objects, as images of gods, crocodile-teeth, etc. When the wearer in battle killed a foe, his breast was opened with a sacred sword, and the tooth and associated objects were dipped in the blood; and after the god of war, to which these objects are sacred, was supposed to have slaked his thirst, the Bagani indulged themselves in the human feast.

In the second book of the Æneid, Virgil refers to a tradition that at one time Sicily was a part of the main-land; and Malta was probably connected in a similar manner. Geologists even claim that Italy was united to Africa by a bridge of land, over which various animals passed.

It would be extremely interesting to trace back the early history of elephants, to follow their ancestry into the past, as we can the horse; but the present state of knowledge renders this difficult if not impossible. The present elephants stand alone and distinct, without any living allies. They are hoofed animals, in this related to the cows, etc.; and in their structure they show some affinities with the gnawing animals, or rodents; but here nearly all resemblances cease. We may follow them back to ancient elephants of the tertiary time, and to the era when mastodons reigned, but we cannot show that they are descended from the mastodons: in short, their history is shrouded in mystery.

One of the earliest proboscidians was the dinotherium, a remarkable animal larger than living elephants, with a trunk, and an enormous head, the lower jaw of which was armed with two powerful tusks which pointed downward, and tended toward the body. This strange elephantine creature lived in the upper miocene time, and has been found only in Europe. It is supposed to have been a water-loving animal, and to have uprooted trees and roots with the powerful tusks. In the accompanying picture (Plate VI.), I have attempted a restoration of the animal, which gives an idea of its general appearance. The dinotherium ranged, as far as known, from France to India, its southern limit in Europe being Greece (Pikermi).

Some authors express the opinion that the singular group of extinct animals known as dinocerata are ancestral forms of the elephant. The various species of dinoceros were animals of elephantine stature, but with shorter limbs; and their heads could reach the ground, so that there was no evident need of a proboscis. Indeed, certain animals may have possessed trunks, and not been elephants, if we may accept the restoration of Burmeister, who shows a pliocene, horse-like animal,—Macrauchenia patagonia,—with a proboscis.

The head of the dinoceros must have presented a remarkable appearance, being provided with two long, sharp, canine teeth, and places for four horns. Whether the latter were present, or not, is not known. All the species that are known come from the Wyoming tertiary. In fact, the question is involved in darkness. Professor Cope considers that they all branched from some primitive stock in eocene times, and at one time stated that the coryphodon, an animal as large as an ox, with a wide elephantine pelvis, was a possible ancestor; but now I believe he looks still farther back, to a group he has termed Taxepoda.

Professor Schmidt of the University of Strasburg says, “In entering upon a discussion of the elephants as a class, it was our wish to do away with what mystery seemed to encompass the existence of the present animal; and we have done so by pointing out their undoubted descent from the miocene mastodons.” The latter forms he considers to “have originated from ancestors of the dinotherium species;” but as to the ancestor of the dinotherium, the learned professor leaves us in the dark as much as ever. It is only within a few years that the genealogy of the horse has been regarded as worked out; and it may be only a matter of time before Cope, Marsh, Leidy, or others will present the world with the original elephant.